Archive for the ‘Active Measures’ Category

While the news cycles have been pundit filled bated breath hot takes on the complaint that was released this last week it is important to take some time and consider what was said as well as not said in this document filed on September 28th in the Eastern District of Virginia. Project Lakhta ( Ла́хта проект ) was what the Russian’s code named the active measures campaign against the USA using social media that was based in St. Petersburg and basically the complaint takes direct aim at the bag woman of the project as a means to an end. Elena Alekseevna Khusayanova was the ostensible target of the charges but one has to ask themselves do we actually ever hope to see this accountant in a US court anytime? I am pretty sure the answer to this is no, so why did the government file these charges and now release them to the public?

My take away’s from this document are as follows:

These charges are just a means to a greater end and may set up a line of argument or charges in the Mueller probe to come

It is also a shot across the bow that the US knows that the project under a new name is still active as of April/May of 2018 of affecting the midterms

That the US and or Five Eyes (FVEY) have compromised their operations and continue to have access

Because access has been achieved we have ALL your documentation from 2014 on to today and we see you!

We have been following the money and we know where you keep it!

So there you have some simple bullet points that I think boil it down for you simplistically. Of course the document also cites company names and they likely have a lot more data that they can you to interrupt the ongoing operations by the Russians but this is all implied for those who play these games in a simple charging document. Of course this seems to have to come from the courts and perhaps the Mueller probe from behind the scenes because the Trump admin is really not going to do anything to rock the boat right? This was a smart move on the part of the US government no matter how impotent it may look on the surface of things given that it is likely now that Elena will not travel to a country with extradition deals with the US if she is smart.

This document as well sets the stage for more to come later that will show in documented form (either intercepts or a cache of documents stolen or bought from their operations) that outline the money trails and company ties between Putin’s chef and all of this. In the future they can use the information for charges, or, to perhaps seize funds later on from the chef? That is an interesting notion as well, after all, it seems the primary way to get to Putin or his oligarchs is through their money right? I look forward to seeing future documents come out and or when Mueller drops his report after the midterms find all of this tied into the final documentation showing a connection between Putin, the chef, Elena, and the Lakhta Project all the way to the overtures to Trump.

…and of course Trump’s actively participating and then covering it up with obstruction of justice.

Keep your eye’s peeled.

K.

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We are beginning to reap the whirlwind in the news cycle from the election of Trump and his breaking of norms that this country and the world have come to rely on. This is exactly what Putin wanted, a country in the midst of a political and social rift that takes our eye off the global ball and allows for negative actions to be carried out without sanction. We have seen Trump set the constitution on fire, the Judicial body of the United States, the Economic norms, and generally break up the balance of power in the world. This has allowed Putin to have greater freedom to act and in turn now others feel empowered. China, North Korea, Syria, and most recently Saudi Arabia have taken actions that would in normal times, possibly not been acted on were the nations not at odds generally due to America’s abdication of its role.

Let’s cover some of the things going on…

RUSSIA:

Putin is still working the levers of power and in so doing he is still making moves on Ukraine all the while leveraging the problems in Syria as well. His actions are two fold, first to annex Ukraine altogether if he can. If he can’t then he will continue to fight with disinformation and active measures campaigns until he has more control over the area even if he cannot all out annex them back into Russia proper. Meanwhile, in Syria, Putin is leveraging Erdrogan and the battle there with da’esh to gain a foothold in the region and have a friendly dictator he can someday use as a proxy against others in the world.

Meanwhile, Putin keeps having his enemies killed off in interesting ways. The list has been topped off as of yesterday with an oligarch who ran afoul of him being found in a park choked to death by a dog leash.

…. A dog leash….

Now that is a metaphor huh? Putin will continue on liquidating his problems with impunity because the norms have all been broken because of Trump. The U.N. NATO, all of the normative bodies have been rebuffed by Trump and weakened. All that is lacking now is an assassination of a Putin enemy on American soil for his win to be complete. Putin pulled a master stroke in helping Trump win. Even so, don’t believe for a second that Putin isn’t also waiting to not only use Trump more, but if Trump begins to fail him he will continue to perform flyovers in our air space like he has been with the BEAR FOXTROTS over Alaska and likely will become more aggressive. I have yet to hear anything about SSN activity but be assured they are there… Waiting.

CHINA:

China has upped it’s espionage games since Trump started his little trade war with them. Recent events have shown a rise in hacking and phishing campaigns that had slowed down since the Xi and Obama agreement. That’s over now though and with the trade war heating things up, and rankles the core ideal of China to be an economic superpower, we are going to see not only more hacking and phishing with a side of theft of IP but also now classical espionage tradecraft to carry out the same goals. All of this will only escalate against the US as we move forward and likely set more things on fire by Trumps economic disaster plan.

MEANWHILE…. China feels empowered too because of all the fractiousness in the world’s governing bodies and has made the ex INTERPOL chief disappear while in China. Gee, China is now feeling like they can just disappear the head of an international investigative body.

Nice.

As all of this is going on we also have coincidentally, the arrest of an MSS asset in Belgium for economic espionage against the US aerospace community. Hmmmm gee, what a coincidence that this happens as the INTERPOL chief is disappeared. As you can see, and perhaps make the connections yourselves, it may be that the MSS is reacting to the impending arrest and or extradition of their asset by grabbing another as a warning?

Hmmm….

Yes, expect more to come out of China with the worsening of the trade wars as well as the eroding of the worlds norms on illegality.

SAUDI ARABIA:

Next up, Saudi Arabia seems to have lured a Washington Post reporter to Saudi only to kill and perhaps dismember him in an embassy there. Saudi has never before been as bold and I directly point toward the breaking of all the norms and groups for this action too. It’s been pretty blatant and I suspect there will be no sanction over this. I mean, look, it’s Saudi right? OPEC, oil? Not to mention that Trump was basically setting himself up to be their stooge since the beginning. Nope, nothing will come of this and now the Saudi’s have killed an Saudi journalist working for an American news org.

I also want to mention the whole glossy magazine that was put out by Trump’s friend David Pecker back last summer. What was this all about? Well, it seems that that was a PR move to make the house of Saud more accessible to the US consumer? Put another way, the new crown prince wanted to look progressive and hip and with the help of Pecker they tried real hard. It’s just that this mark was missed with this publication. In fact it only made an already wary populace start asking questions as to why this happened and what kind of conspiracy was afoot. Expect more to come out of this Saudi reporters death and it will likely not be pretty. If they get away with this, and I think they will, then expect Saudi to pull some more stunts in the future as the crown prince get’s more bold.

TRUMP REPUBLICANS:

Finally, the TRUMP party, I really don’t consider them Republicans anymore, will continue to push the limits of the nations norms and laws until they are just removed from power. The events around the recent SCOTUS nomination and confirmation of Kavanaugh are a clear example of how the Trump party is abusing their control over the house and senate to get whatever they want over what the governed wants. The Kavanaugh thing is just the most naked misuse of their power though to date and I am sure more will be coming once Trump replaces Sessions with a minion under his control. This will set the trifecta into play; DOJ under his control, SCOTUS under his control, and Mueller with a new target painted on his back.

I fully expect that when this happens the Russia investigation will be liquidated and the Trump party will lock arms and say that this is not a constitutional crisis. Of course then the DOJ will agree and SCOTUS will concur. It will all disappear at least legally right? This is Trump’s greatest desire and it seems more and more likely that this can happen because of the Kavanaugh ascension. An alternate timeline to this would be that Trump allows the investigation to finish but then has Kavanaugh in his pocket to be the deciding vote on whether or not a sitting president can be indicted.

Either way, it seems that if Trump can replace Sessions with a partisan minion, we are all doomed.

Even more worrying is the upcoming mid term elections. If the Trump party continues to be in contol, expect to look fondly at the times of outrage over Trump’s mild bad actions because he will feel empowered to do even more bad things if he has total control.

Once again, thanks Putin.

We are at a tipping point here and not just with regard to climate change kids.

So Microsoft proclaimed that they had taken down some domains and stopped the GRU/SVR from carrying out some more active measures against the US election cycle. Now, they obviously have some more intel than they are letting us all know about because while the domains are definitely set up for some gov spearphishing, we don’t have any emails or data to show they actively had a campaign running. The domains (see below) are concerned with two think tanks that have a plethora of data that the Russians would want to have and perhaps tinker with but the government domains are aimed squarely at the Senate.

While the domains that are meant to typo-squat the think tanks are around one hundred days old, the senate domains are much older. In fact, these domains have been creepin around anywhere nearly a year to just over a year. So you can see where the Russian services were aiming and have been planning for at least a year plus on the senate campaign. The think tanks are a newer though and as such I have to wonder about the thought process by the GRU/SVR on these. Were the Russians looking to simply gain access to these think tanks and gather intel not just on their Russian stances but also around the world as the Russians have done before (mostly by the SVR collections missions) or was their plan to somehow steal their data and leak it as part of the larger active measures campaigns?

It seems though from my searching that the domains never had any real pages attached to them but for one having an IIS front end with nothing else. Wayback machine fails on all of them as does Google, so I am going to assume that these were all just domains used as C2 for traffic and perhaps a drive by attack in the case of one that showed up in VT and Hybrid (see above) but I could find no malware being attached to these domains with these tools. This is not to say that they didn’t and that people clicked on links and got infected at the Senate or these think tanks. I guess we will have to wait for Microsoft to elucidate some more on these.

But, back to these think tanks and the phishing that likely was to come or already happened. I am going to assume they already happened and that is how these domains were picked up because something happened internally and got reported? I MS paying that much attention to domains or is it they were seeing O365 traffic (phish) and caught on? As I remember reading so far they really don’t tell us how they got the tip off but they must have had evidence because they took over the domains. In this section though, I want to focus on the why and the what of the active measures here by the Russians. Why these two think tanks? What were they going to do with the access one wonders. Or would this have been in tandem with the senate domains luring those being phished to an IRI report? It turns out that IRI (International Republican Institute) put out a press release on the revelations on their domain squat.

I guess that either IRI could be phished itself as well as this as well as the other org squatted (Hudson Institute) could be not only the targets of phish using these domains but also used as fodder to entice Republicans as well as perhaps Democrats to click on a tasty link and either get a drive by or be linked to a credential phishing site. As the DNC attacks I believe were credential harvesting sites, it is likely that this would be the case for all these entities were the Russians looking to gain a foothold on any of them. I am gonna say though, that the domain my-iri.org and the sharepoint domain for hudson.org says that they were looking to fool internal folks into clicking on something. As to the other domains it looks straight up like internal users being targeted.

So what would the goals be here with these? If you were to go after their internal systems and the fellows there what would you be looking for? I am going to say this too would have been a fishing expedition for information that the Russian government could use to destabilize all kinds of places as well as to understand how the think tanks were approaching Russia. If you look at the image at the top of the page you can even see how Hudson has a paper on countering the Kleptocracy. My concern here would be that not only would the adversaries be looking to steal information but also to pull the same kind of job on these orgs that they did to the DNC. Basically, I think it would be a disinformation campaign against these orgs to cause instability in their content and their following. I could also see tinkering with their reports as well as a means to make them untrustworthy. An added bonus to this also would be collection on any collaborators that the Russians might want to eliminate in country if the emails have source conversations too.

Of course now we are hearing that the Russians are attacking not only Dems but also Republicans and it is important to remember that their goal is to sow chaos and cause division. This is because if they can cause these things, the outcome is to have inaction as well as possibly traction for those like Trump that they are actively supporting with these kinds of active measures as we saw in 2016. So, there you have it, unless Microsoft and others care to give us some more information to work from this is pretty much all you can glean from their motives by proxy of their domains. You can see though, that they have been working on these plans for some time, at least a year for the think tanks and over a year for the senate campaigns.

In closing though, I want to just say that it would be real easy for the Russians to get the conventions of the email addresses as well as who to target at these institutions just by using LinkedIN. I did some cursory searches in Google and LI and came up with shovels full of names and email addresses to use. It’s phishing season kids! I do wonder just how much security training these people have….

Hmmmm…

K.

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Recently the bowels of 4chan erupted with an ongoing thread’s dire warnings from an anonymous poster named “Q” into the real world. The posts, consisting of word jumbles and conspiracy wet dreams began to take on a new life in the real world at protests over Trump, MAGA, and the fight against all that is sane. I had looked at the original posts on Reddit in 2017 when they started and just shrugged it off as just another conspiracy hoax cum disinformation campaign by person’s unknown. How it would become an issue today just before the mid-term elections few could have conceived.

As you can see the posts are little more than bad haiku but, the conspiracy nuts on Reddit and 4chan and now a couple other aggregation sites (more on that later) have been busily using their cognitive dissonance to make crazy connections from these posts to a globalist conspiracy the likes of which even Alex Jones could not come up with himself! Basically the stories all lead to an overarching New World Order conspiracy that has everything, Illuminati, NWO, Soros, Pizzagate, and other crazy ideas all wrapped up in a bow being spoon fed crumbs about by someone allegedly inside the government with what is known as a “Q” clearance (DOE clearance) Of course Q cannot give just a straight narrative or a drop of classified data, no, it has to be this whack haiku as you see above.

I have tried to read more of this than a few pages but literally I started to go insane from reading this drivel, so I moved on to reading the output from a QAnon conspiracy site that archives and “makes sense” for the lay reader all the juicy secret conspiracies that are in the Q “archives” and man, it is full of cognitive bias, mental illness, and fantasy. I will not make you read it all here but if you do want to look for yourselves you can check the links at the bottom I will gift you all with. More interestingly though, I wanted to cover the movement as it stands today and to show you some of the information I was able to wrest from the archive site itself. The data that I got actually show’s real names of people involved (well, real I guess) that perhaps can be drilled down on some more later on.

Seen above are just some of the crazy ideas these people have about hidden codes in Q posts as well as the interaction of Trump on his Twitter feed. It seems these idiots believe that “Q” is in contact with Trump over Twitter and they are working together to destroy the globalist NWO conspiracy of lizard people ruling the world!

I shit you not.

So yeah, it’s a fair bit insane so please medicate if you plan on wading any further into the nutbaggery. However, I want to direct you to the site that this stuff came from and in particular the guy(s) who created it and are running it. At the top of this post you can see the image of a Twitter account for a “Iambecauseweare” which it turns out is the owner/operator (self proclaimed) of the irc.qclearancearchive.net a clearinghouse of all things Q and a primer of sorts for those who want to know the great truth and get involved.

This site is a font of Q information but, when you start to look under the hood, then you can see that there are some interesting threads to tug on. The site has a lot of information but what I was more interested in was that they have a penchant for creating pdf’s for the masses to conveniently download. Using Foca, I aggregated all the pdf’s and then ripped out all their metadata to see who was creating these things.

Out of about 200 pdf’s I have come up with 8 user names in the metadata. In this group one of them is a known conspiracy author (William Milton Cooper) but the others are all unknown people to me. Four of the accounts are just short names and no help but the other two, Mark C. Duncan and Martin Jr. Donald, seem to be legit names on the face of it. Now since they were all pdf’s there was not as much rich metadata as there would have been had they been Word files but at the very least we have some names to work with here.

The domain qclearancearchive.net was registered 225 days ago and done so anonymously, and with GDPR now, you get fuck all when you are trying to do OSINT on these kinds of things (thanks EU) so I am gonna have to rely on these names and some digging to get anywhere else. I started some cursory searches on these names and did not find much in the way of data. A second pass has yielded some information on Mark C. Duncan;

This Mark C. Duncan has two reviews in his Amazon list for books on conspiracy theories. One on the Mason’s and the other on Alien abductions. Well, this could very well be the guy but I have yet to get much else on him which makes me want to keep searching and I will. The other name that came out of the metadata was “Martin Jr. Donald” which is an interesting way to put that in your system’s metadata. I am going to assume that the name is Donald Martin Jr. and a search of this name is just as obtuse. The hits that come up first for this name are all about a 400lb guy in Ohio that asphyxiated his nephew by sitting on him…

Which, yeah, anything is possible here. I see no other digital bread crumbs (snerk look it up in the archives) to go on with this. So I am kinda at a dead end here unless they make some more mistakes. However, I would like to direct you to the language of the posts and pdf’s. Either these people are the most illiterate of sorts, or, English is not their first language.

All in all this is a nightmare to read and I would not recommend anyone do so. However, given recent events in Ohio and other places where QAnon’s have started showing up (including Trump rallies) I would suggest that we pay a little more attention to this movement. I suspect that at the very least this is yet another Russian active measure that is at best supported by the GRU and at worst, run by the GRU. Given that the movement has self realized and is now in the real world, I would think that if the GRU wasn’t already supporting or running this campaign, they soon will be as well.

I will leave you with the links here and move on from here. I will take a peek at their site intermittently to see if they leak anything else. There was no Cyrillic this time in the data, no keyboard layout, no language packs. Just some names that could be crazies in the states here who are just acting out because Trump has given them the air they need to do so. At worst though, here we go again with the active measures just before the mid terms.

It seems that some are buying into the coincidences that QAnon may be a new take on another Q, a book called Q by “Luther Bisset” a nome de plume for a couple authors of this Italian novel

While this is a close comparison I am doubtful that this is a giant prank against the Alt-right/Nazi/Trumpistanians. If it is in fact a prank, it has now gone way past that into action and terrible possible repercussions. The fact that these idiots are now showing up in the Trump Nuremberg rallies and elsewhere, and that he has tacitly accepted it all to his repertoire should scare the alleged pranksters greatly.

After looking into this whole debacle I have to say that this story doesn’t quite wash for me. This whole story isn’t just all about boomers to start. How many boomers are on fucking reddit? Fuck, for that matter how many are out there actively on 8chan or 4chan?

COME ON!

Nope, this is something else. Maybe, if it was a prank, it took on a life of it’s own but if Q is still posting, then these guys are about to get into a world of pain as I am sure now the federal authorities are interested in this because it has become a real world issue. Even if it was a prank to start, it may also be that the Russians decided to take this on and amplify this to their own ends. The whole dialog is very Trumpian and adds to the chaos.

Meh.

You guys decide for yourselves.

K.

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So this morning I saw a tweet come across the feed by RVAWonk that was proclaiming that the IRA was back with a new site and the fuckery was pretty much just naked on their part. In the article she goes over the salient technical details of the site and the accounts. It also has another nice linked post that does a bit more in that area as well and I recommend you all read that too. However, I took a bit of a deeper dive looking at the site itself and it’s coding as well as did some Maltego mapping of it and the Twitter account. My overall take on all of that is pretty much “meh” … What really intrigues me and has been bothering me for some time now is that everyone is busy mapping all this shit but the fact of the matter is that mapping does not stop the cognitive dissonance that the Russians are playing on to win this game.

The Russians here are basically at a point where they aren’t even trying to hide the fact that the site is a Russian propaganda/disinformation effort and this is the important fact we all seem to be missing in this community. This shit works and even though most people do not have the technical abilities to look deeper into the code and the domains, it is pretty plain when you look at the site itself where they use Cyrillic and Russian in their image names and such that it is in fact a Russian operation.

We will all likely go down the rabbit hole on the how many followers they have on Twitter and who they follow. We will collate all the data and sift it and parse it all to put out reports on how they did this. My problem though is that we can investigate the shit out of this all we want but unless we come up with strategies to deny, degrade, or destroy the content, it will reach those tribalists out there who want it and the damage of 2016 will continue on unabated. What’s even more galling here is that the Russians have basically pulled a Babe Ruth by announcing this site and putting it out there so flagrantly with cyrillic in it and on domains owned by a russian domain hosting service. In reality they just gave us the bird and we are now going to just have to sit by and watch as they inflame the Trumpists to hopefully affect the mid terms with this crap.

Of course maybe Twitter will catch on here and swat this account offline? You hear me Jack? … *tap tap* this thing on?

Oh well, so there’s a new site and it seems they have also employed an SEO in there as well. The site has a lot of means to track posts, likes, geolocations etc as well. I have mirrored the whole site and am still poking through the code. The SEO is a new old site too with an anonymous domain resister back in April of this year that likely is also the Russian’s doing as well. I am sure many of the community will keep an eye on it as we go along so someone will eventually write about this as well with rapt verbiage not really doing anything about the problem as well.

So here’s my thing, we are all spending all this time nattering on about it but what can we do to stop such propaganda sites and Twitter accounts from spreading the mind virus? If we cannot stop them, how can we innoculate the general public from the effects of such mental plagues? These are the questions we should be asking and I just don’t hear it happening. I know that it is a rich and difficult problem dealing with the psyche and cognitive dissonance but we really need to lay off all the techno babble and focus on real solutions. Solutions that conern the human animal, not the technology kids. The Russians already know this and they are leveraging it. I mean, how much more blatant do they have to be? How about they just post billboards now in Cyrillic for Trump in all those Trump states?

I was recently looking at some stuff online about the Skripal case and came across this guy and his site through a link from an article. The article was on a guy who also has been evidently poisoned by Russia (biotoxin this time) in France but they make reference to Inside-Russia as they wrote about the case evidently. Anyway, the Inside Russia thing intrigued me because the guy who started the site and still runs it is from my neck of the woods (Greenwich Connecticut) on the gold coast as we call it here. Evidently Charles J. Bausman, a 53 year old American (ex… Patriot?) who now evidently lives in Russia, runs the propaganda site known as “Inside-Russia” and works in finance, or agro-business finance. At any rate, the site is quite the nest of pro Putin propagandist and antisemitism. In looking around I had to wonder just how a kid from Connecticut who went to a swank prep school here and Wesleyan University (somewhere I went for a summer) ended up a Russian propagandist front and allied with a couple oligarchs close to the Kremlin?

Bausman’s Resume in Cyrillic sent to an Oligarch in hopes of getting financing

Bausman say’s he was born in Germany in 64 and travelled a lot including a long stint in Russia (Moscow) when his father was on a “long business trip” which is to say that his father was bureau chief for the AP back in the old Sov days. John Bausman III was all over the place as an AP reporter but that time in Russia seems to have affected Charles quite a bit. I am not sure just when and how Charles became a Putin propagandist but the site he set up started in August 2014 and has been gaining momentum ever since. In doing all the background on Charles I had to wonder about his father, which, I could not find too much on other than his obit’s online.

I have to wonder just how his father felt about his son’s Soviet/Putin leanings after he started the site, which by the way, was registered with the house in Greenwich where they Bausman’s lived in Greenwich CT. As John was older, perhaps he did not really get to see the site or know much about it. Maybe he did and approved of his son’s leanings? I am not sure, but suffice to say that it may be their travels in the Baltics during the old days might have affected his young son profoundly. I can imagine that if he wasn’t home schooled, he may have been indoctrinated by the Soviet state in some way in his youth. I just don’t really know, but, the other thing that kinda crossed my mind again and again was what were John’s leanings on all this? Like father like son?

At any rate, the son is an out and out Putin “Praetorian” as the book “Putin’s Praetorians” claims and evidently Charles could not resist writing a review of it on Amazon. In fact Charles enjoys his titles as even on his Twitter feed, he boasts of being one of Louise Mensch’s “Russian Trolls” which is I have to say Amusing as I myself am blocked by her because she is an idiot hanger on of the jester. Anyway, if not a troll, what Charles is is, a propagandist tool. Or, I should really say a “would be” tool because he is not trying to hide his identity and is fairly open with his propaganda claptrap he is trying to sell the the conspiracy masses. His site is a “collective” of writers he says, but in looking at them only a few are named and one of them, Anatoly Karlin, is a straight out conspiracy Nazi connected apparatchik for Putin.

Now, on the account of this site being akin to the IRA, well, no that is not the case. However, the Twitter feed and the content is pretty popular and has been rising over the last couple years, peaking in January this year as everything went to hell concerning the RussiaGate story. I would not be surprised if anyone were to do some more mining and find that accounts proximal to the IRA Twitter accounts might have this on their feeds as well. While all of this spin and energy has been building though, Charles has been hungry for funds to continue his work, even though he is some kind of finance wizard according to all his degree work and jobs over the years with Russian banks and the like.

You can donate to Russia-Insider on their site and they take bitcoin and paypal as well as a couple other more obscure payment schemes. Evidently “citizen journalism” costs the big bucks! While his bitcoin wallet has had no transactions at all, I have to wonder just who is paying for his site and activities. In 2014, just after launching the site he exhorted Alexey Komov and Konstantin Malofeev that “I still need money!” which can be seen in the screen shots above from emails that I got from Shaltai Boltai’s dump of Malofeev’s email spool. I went through all seven hundred plus emails and found no more than those you see above. So it is unclear whether or not the Kremlin connected Komov and Malofeev ponied up money but they seemed amenable to it in the emails that I saw. I am going to assume that since the site is still up and that Bausman has added a slew of other domains, he has more plans and that he also got the funding to start. Only time will tell if he moves further and activates the other sites that he owns.

As you can see, if he had it his way, perhaps Russia-Insider would not be the only “insider” site that he could be spreading propaganda with. It is interesting to note that the countries he has chosen to create domains for are all ones that the Russian state would be interested in targeting propaganda at. I am not really sure what the “Cadmus” site would be all about but if you know your history, Cadmus was a slayer of monsters in the Greek pantheon. So far none of these sites has ever had content on them so there is nothing to see.. yet. Maybe if Charles gets his money he will someday have a media empire eh?

Overall, this guy is no clear and present danger but he is one of the lights in the constellation that is RU apologist propaganda. He isn’t RT or Sputnik just yet but he has ambitions to be I think. What really just makes me wonder is, as I said at the top, how does this kid go from US citizen to Russian propagandist? So many unanswered questions on this one for me. Was his father enamored with the Soviet state in the 60’s and 70’s? I mean it was no pleasure dome out there at that time no matter what the Soviet state would like you to think. Of course some might see Wesleyan and think that the left leaning’s of the school would only entice a youth to become more liberal, but jeez, I mean this guy is full on nutbaggy! Also, this guy still has everything listed in America as ownership goes! The Russia-Insider site before being set to privacy still has his parents place listed as the address! Choose a country dude.

Well, that’s about it on this one. Just a little heads up on this guy and a bit of background. I kind of have a yen to drive down to Greenwich and visit the Russia-Insider HQ just for shits and giggles. If anyone else has any tidbits they care to drop on me use the Protonmail acct. Until next time, keep watching these whacknuts.

Dos vidanya,

K.

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Recently I posted about the Russian Troll Farm’s data being on sale for more than a year on joker.buzz, an auction site for RU hackers most likely to be affiliated with Shaltai Boltai (humpy dumpty). I went through the dump looking for metadata and to backstop the screen shots that were on the site as part of the proofs that the data was legit. In doing so I managed to find out quite a bit more on the infrastructure, players, and accounts that the SVR had set up to carry out the active measures campaign against the US election in 2016. Now having been a security researcher blogger all these years I certainly expect that others may see a story and write their own and often times this happens with a link back to my post if it is germane. However, in this case it kinda seems like Beast and the reporters who wrote the two pieces on their site saw my post and decided that they would just say they had “discovered” the joker.buzz site and the data for their own clickbait desires.

The fact of the matter is that Beast didn’t discover anything, if anyone discovered the story it was insider.ru who posted the story in Russia on the 21st of February. I cited them in my post as well as the joker.buzz url that the Insider piece had linked in the article February 21st. So no Daily Beast and “reporters” thereof, you did not discover this nor did you even have the decency to link back to either pieces in your story. I find it funny how I post on February 26th and four days later the Beast is claiming to have “found” this site and the juicy data. What’s even worse is that Beast just goes on about accounts and tracking them back to people while the real story should be that the data is genuine, it shows more of the inner workings of the troll farm aside from the accounts on Reddit and other places, and that either an insider had been selling the data or they had been hacked for over a year and we all missed it.

At first I griped a bit on Twitter about this but I was willing to let it go until one of the editors at Beast wanted in on my Twitter feed all of a sudden. I allowed it and watched for a couple days. They did not attempt to reach out at all so now I am pretty sure they were fishing for more to rip off of my site or my feed and possibly claim it as their own “investigative journalism” cum click bait. This was the last straw, and with a word from another reporter who exhorted me to do a write up about this.. Well here I am writing this piece that I am kind of ambivalent about. I don’t want to come off as just some asshole saying “I DID IT FIRST!” but the fact of the matter is that this has happened on more than one occasion and of late more so (looking at you Franklin Foer on that Atlantic article on Manafort)

So, Beast, at least credit the Russian’s (insider.ru) for seeing this first and reporting on it even if you can’t bring yourselves to link back to my post which I am pretty sure was the tip off to what you claimed you “discovered” In fact, you should really do your own research and stop leeching off of others you yellow journalism hacks. Shit, you even really didn’t do a good job at parsing all the data in those screen shots! You really have not added to the knowledge base here on the Russia investigation.. But you sure did re-create the “Penny Dreadfuls” of the 19th century!